


orbital resonance

by devicing



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: M/M, Post-Game, Simulation AU, how meta can one fic possibly go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 03:45:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14729331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devicing/pseuds/devicing
Summary: In the game, Momota’s ambition had been unparalleled. In the game he had dived headfirst into all of his problems and had worked to overcome them with a voracious spirit and undaunted optimism. In the game, he’d faced even death with the conviction of a lionheart.But the game hadn't been real, so instead Momota tips his gaze off to the side, breaking their stalemate like the coward he is, and quietly shuts the door.[spoilers for all of NDRv3]





	orbital resonance

**Author's Note:**

> *arrives 2 days late to Oumota week with Starbucks*
> 
> Hey, I'm supposed to be working on an ongoing fic for a completely different fandom right now, but then I saw that it was Oumota week and this ship is where I've lain myself down to die, so I expanded upon a 700 word unfinished thing from 3 months ago instead oops ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

 

In a dark, empty corner of the AV room, he finds Ouma looming behind a pyramid of cards, five rows tall and still yet unfinished. 

It’s 1:57am, or so says the ancient DVD player sitting below the television at the far wall. 

It’s also February 21st. A Friday. He knows this because the psychologist told them to write the date in neat script at the tops of their pages yesterday during group talk. Without her cheerful, plastic insistence, he’s not sure he’d know the date at all. Time doesn’t seem to pass much here.

The pen she’d given him had been a deep magenta with tiny gold and silver stars snaking up its sides. She’d handed it to him with a wink meant to be friendly, but in that moment he’d wanted nothing more than to snap the damn thing into pieces across his knuckles. Well, better the pen than a finger or a wrist or a neck…

He shakes the memory off.

Ouma gazes at him from between the cards. His dark eyes seem to suck up all the moonlight surrounding him. Momota still hasn’t taken his hand off of the doorknob. 

In the game, Momota’s ambition had been unparalleled. In the game he had dived headfirst into all of his problems and had worked to overcome them with a voracious spirit and undaunted optimism. In the game, he’d faced even death with the conviction of a lionheart.

But the game hadn’t been real, so instead Momota tips his gaze off to the side, breaking their stalemate like the coward he is, and quietly shuts the door.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

A week later he finds Ouma again in the same dark, empty corner of the AV room, this time huddled over a jigsaw puzzle, its surface as milky white as the light pouring in from beyond the barred-up windows behind him.

The DVD player says it’s 2:18am. February 27th. A Thursday. 

Ouma’s face is as purposefully blank as the puzzle’s, but his eyes don’t skirt away from Momota like he thought they would. They remain, transfixed and haunting, and even something as innocuous as that has Momota wanting to cow under their weight. In that sense, maybe this quieter, milder Ouma—the one who’s been drifting between the shadows of the participants’ ward for weeks like foxfire—is still less of a coward than he is. 

That foxfire gaze is a silent challenge, but not an overly insistent one. Momota’s hand white-knuckles the doorknob, but tonight he resolves to be better than the hollow echo of Fridays past. Tonight he lets go of the stiff clench of his muscles and his trepidation both and steps into the room.

Ouma doesn’t say anything when he takes a seat across from him, and he doesn’t say anything under Momota’s cautious ( _suspicious_ ) scrutiny. Even fifteen minutes later he doesn’t say a word as Momota reaches out to slot one of the puzzle pieces into place himself, and for that Momota is oddly grateful. 

Because, really, he’s so tired of expectations.

The psychologist, with her draw-string smiles and misguided attempts at comfort, expects him to be honest. The execs in their gilded halls expect him to be profitable as the series rides out the last crescendo of its swan-song. Beyond the Schrödinger’s-cat walls of the rehabilitation ward, the endless sea of Dangan Ronpa admirers and detractors alike probably expect him to be a lot things, but at the very least some form of entertaining.

With their conspicuous absence from visiting hours ( _something that an echo of himself remembers shouldn’t be surprising_ ), his family’s unspoken expectations are no doubt the same as they always had been.

Still, none of these compare to the expectations Momota’s had of himself. Just as his palms still remember the warm weight of Shuuichi's trembling shoulders beneath them, his fists still remember the visceral thrill of split knuckles and broken jaws, and— _fuck—_ he _hates it_. Most of all he hates _himself_ , specifically these jagged pieces under his skin that seem to splinter out from an unfamiliar core somewhere deep down inside him, too deep for him to get a clear picture of. 

Though he might have offered up a challenge earlier, Momota gets the feeling Ouma hadn’t really cared if he’d turned tail or not. Silent and focused with his knees tucked up to his chin and more solid than he’s appeared in weeks, Ouma doesn’t seem to have any expectations of Momota at all.

He slots another piece into place, and Ouma doesn’t even stir.

A tension that’s been twisting up Momota’s gut for weeks unfurls, just a little.

It’s enough.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The DVD player has been in pieces in the non-burnables bin in the reception office for three days now. It met the same fate as the rest of Iruma’s pet projects, born out of stir-crazed anxiety and denial.

Still, it’s a Tuesday. He knows that at least.

Harumaki hasn’t spoken to him since she resurfaced from her virtual slumber, which is fine. She seems just as haunted by the specter of his kindness as he is, now that it’s no longer filtered through rose-colored VR glasses. He can’t be what she wanted, if she even truly wanted it at all, but at least they both know it. That’s a kindness of its own, even if the guilt of it stings of failure. Still, on the days their gazes _do_ find each other searching from opposite sides of the dining hall, she’ll nod back at him—stiff but sure. Lately there’s even been the hint of a smile. 

Shuuichi, to his credit, tries. They’re all different creatures now, but him especially so. There’s a telltale, steadfast determination in the cut of his shoulders some days, and Momota takes some selfish pride in knowing it was a version of himself’s influence that drew that out in the first place. But it still needs drawing out now—maybe even more so than before—from where it’s buried deep behind the haunted shadow of his shame and his hypocrisy. Momota knows that he tries so hard to be the version of himself he had become, but the smallest things ( _a review show on TV not changed quickly enough, a nurse’s Season 17 rubber strap peaking out from her pocket, a gentle piano melody through the halls_ ) have him clamming up and sheltering himself behind wall after wall after wall.

Momota loves them both so fiercely, but that only makes the contrasts in his overlapping selves stand out stronger, like negative film. 

It’s hard to reconcile with, but this is a process, he tells himself. 

For now it’s enough. 

_(It’s not, though—no, it’s never enough. He still aches for connection, but every line pulled out of his yarn-spool heart is pulled too tight and made of too-fragile stuff. He would reel them in and pull them back in a heartbeat if he could—and_ **_fuck_ ** _if the beast prowling under his skin doesn’t roar for him to do that every hour of the day—but he knows not to. They’d unravel in an instant, too threadbare and frayed, and that would be even worse.)_

He side-eyes the DVD player’s fractured remains as he ducks past the office window and creeps further down the hall.

When he slowly pushes the AV room’s door open, Ouma is already crouched and waiting. There’s a haphazard spread of Mahjong tiles scattered at his feet. He aims a cocked-eyebrow in Momota’s direction. Again, not an expectation, just a weirdly silent challenge laid out for him to take if he wants to. _Fight or flight, space boy._

Momota frowns. “I dunno how to play.”

With a start, he realizes it’s the first thing he’s said to Ouma in this strange second-life of theirs. They haven’t spoken a word since the hangar, when the last thing he’d heard Ouma utter was a cut off sob meant for no one’s ears but his own before the press had—

Ouma shrugs. “You don’t have to.”

He’s not sure if he means _you don’t have to know the rules_ or _you don’t have to play_. He goes with the former, seating himself down across from where Ouma is spinning whirlpools into the sea of face-down tiles.

“I thought you needed four people for Mahjong,” Momota mutters as he crosses his legs and slots his chin into his palm.

Ouma snorts, short and subdued. “Who told you that?” he replies, tracking the ebb and flow with narrowed eyes.

_My grandma_ , Momota almost says, but she’s been dead for nearly two decades now. He bites at a puckered bit of raw skin at the corner of his mouth in lieu of answering.

Ouma’s fingers still from where they’d been stacking the tiles into pretty little rows. He carefully leans across the expanse between them and pushes a neat set of thirteen into a perfect line at Momota’s feet. Then he tips his chin upwards and stares up at him, blinking owlishly. Even without the needling remarks and trademark grin he’d grown so used to, Momota has a feeling he’s been found out.

Then Ouma leans back and selects his own tiles. “Two players is best for a beginner anyway,” is all he says.

Momota looks at the space between them, four tiny plastic walls pinwheeling out like cardinal points on a compass. Ouma hunches over his tiles, regarding them with a calculated gaze and rearranging them into some kind of order. When Momota doesn’t start shuffling his own, he glances up again.

Everything in the game had been bright and impossibly saturated, which never seemed out of place at the time, but real life has made things more obvious in retrospect. Ouma’s eyes aren’t purple anymore, at least not like they were before. The inky black of them is familiar, and yeah in certain lighting there might be a purplish hue buried in there, but they’re a far cry from what Momota’s used to. The sharp intent in them, though, that’s all the same. The way every shift of his expression—from calm calculation to wary curiosity—is rooted in the subtle arch of his eyebrows or the fall of his lids… _that’s_ where the familiarity comes in.

In their last moments together in the hangar, Momota had started to formulate a theory (if only to try to wrench some sense out of an otherwise senseless night): more than his words or his aggrandized body language, maybe the truth that everyone had always tried to dig out of Ouma was hidden behind his eyes.

He never got an answer (being on borrowed time and all), but this doesn’t exactly disprove his hypothesis. It’s a stark reminder that Ouma, _this_ Ouma, both _is_ and _isn’t_ who Momota knew in the game. 

And that stirs up a lot of conflicting emotions.

“Hey, Ouma…” he finds himself saying, face twisting into something between a grimace and a guilty flinch. His hand makes a fist around one of the tiles he’d picked up. “Y’think maybe we oughta ta—”

“—Bamboos, characters, and dots,” Ouma interrupts. Then, after a stilted pause. “Those are the three suits. I’m sure you can figure out which is which. Probably.”

His expression doesn’t shift, but the intensity does. _Don’t_ , the curve of his brow staunchly demands. His jaw is tight.

Momota bites his tongue and tries to tamp down the sensation roiling in his stomach. A strange mixture of frustration, aggravation, and—oddly enough—disappointment. The first two attempt to win out. His muscles jump to lash out, even as his guilt makes him twist inwards. The tile bites into his palm.

Ouma watches unflinchingly through it all, but somewhere in those night-water eyes there’s a ripple.

_Hah_ , a fractured part of Momota thinks with smug vindication, _you’re just like the rest of us after all._

A better part of him ducks his eyes down and starts to shuffle the pieces into some semblance of order.

Ouma lets out a small rush of a breath. It sounds relieved. “Just put them in numbered order and work from there,” he says of the tiles, turning back down to his own.

Momota lets the frustration seep out of his skin.

A conversation for another time, then, he supposes.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Another night he opens the door only to find Ouma spread out with arms and legs akimbo in the center of the floor. This time there isn’t a game in sight. In one hand he holds something up to the moonlight above his head. Whatever it is scatters violet light in stained-glass fractals across his face as he turns it over between his fingers.

“Don’t worry,” he says, without even looking towards the door. “I brought yours along too so you wouldn’t feel left out.”

He gestures one foot off to the side. Wary but still curious, Momota shuts the door behind him with a soft click and goes to investigate. 

Scattered across one of the coffee tables by the sofas he finds five acrylic keychains. Momota spots the one at the top and freezes. There lies a tiny, cartoon image of himself, overly saturated in color and plastic in more ways than one. Through its clear backing he sees the brim of a ratty cap, a studded leather harness, a pair of wireless frames around unnaturally red eyes, and an arpeggio scale—each separate keychain tinted in an easy-to-market, easily-recognizable color scheme.

“Only a couple more weeks now,” Ouma mutters. 

Momota’s chest twists tightly, but he picks up the Momota branded merchandise anyway. Just like Ouma, he turns it over in the feeble lighting, as though he’ll find something in it he recognizes if he just looks hard enough. 

Maybe this is what he’d had wanted when he’d recklessly scrawled his signature over all of team Dangan Ronpa’s stupid legal docs. Or, maybe he hadn’t cared about the fame one way or another. Maybe, like the comets he’d admired so fervently in the game, he’d just wanted to go out in a blaze of glory—a vibrant flash of radioactive dust and then nothing.

Either thought is enough to make his gut sour. 

“… _fuck_ ,” he says, lamely. 

Over on the floor, Ouma lets out a sarcastic bark of a laugh. It stirs up a different kind of warmth in Momota’s stomach that has nothing to do with his nausea or with the angry coals that have been burning through him for weeks now. Solidarity, he thinks.

“Hey,” Ouma asks, finally turning those dark-water eyes on him. His mouth is open on a half-baked grin and his eyes are hooded. “Who do you think will sell out first?”

Whether in the game or out of it, Ouma is still a master of uneasy doublespeak.

Momota considers the painted-up portraits on the keychains and the mosaic of blue, pink, and green light they scatter across the table. He looks back to the saturated fragment of himself preserved in the varnished plastic, smile as bright as the stars he points one noble finger up towards.

Fighting back a snarl, he snaps the damn thing in two, right through the middle of his own smug fucking grin. 

Ouma doesn’t even flinch.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Talking to the psychologist gets boring.

Talking to the other students gets him uneasy but grateful smiles and temporary relief.

Talking to Maki and Shuuichi gets easier, and it gets harder paradoxically.

Talk talk _talk_. 

Momota opens the door to the AV Room. Ouma sends him a tired wobble of a smile as he gestures at the chess board already set up and waiting before his crossed feet.

Momota closes the door behind him and lets the tension fall from his shoulders.

Because he and Ouma don’t really talk, and if they do, it’s pointedly _not_ about—

( _crossbowboltsandremotecontrolsandhastilywrittenmanuscriptsandbloodbloodblo—_ ) 

—well, not about _that._

And, frankly, even if it’s just running away, it’s the closest thing to feeling normal he knows these days.

And those days are numbered.

It’s Tuesday, again.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

When Dangan Ronpa’s development team had pieced him together, they’d given Momota just a pinch of impulsivity and a temper to color him bold—the archetype of the lovable spitfire. It was a tried and true strategy that had always sold well in the past.

These days, Momota finds himself angry most of the time _,_ but this anger isn’t lovable. The anger he feels now is a terrifying beast, one that’s been prowling inside him ever since he woke up to a body and a reality that felt both familiar and not.

What’s so frustrating, though, is the fact that the beast doesn’t seem to have one simple catalyst. Or maybe it has too many. All he knows is that it’s been licking up his insides for weeks like fire, steadily growing and bubbling over the bars of its caging no matter how hard he’d tried to force it back down.

Shuuichi, on one of his better days, had told Momota that it’s not his fault. With a clammy hand curved overtop Momota’s own, he’d smiled and insisted that whatever this beast was, it wasn’t him. That it didn’t define him. That’s it wasn’t the real Momota, the Momota that _he_ knew.

Momota appreciated the thought—he really did—but Shuuichi's easy assurance born out of ignorance and the kind curve of his adulated smile had only made the beast lash out all the more fiercely. Because no matter how much Momota hated to admit it, he couldn’t deny that he _knew_ this beast. After all, it’s just another fractured part of him trying to make itself whole. Every time he’s stared at his reflection for too long because he still doesn’t fully recognize himself, every time he’s felt phantom pain in his lungs when he’s tried to breathe, and every time he’s felt all of the lines of that yarn-spool heart of his starting to pull taut—each and every doubt and fear he’s felt has just been another opening for the beast to push back against. And it had scared him, that no matter how hard he’d tried to beat them back, the beast’s flames had only come back stronger.

Today, however, instead of lashing out at every one of his own misgivings as it had been doing for weeks, the beast turns its predatory eyes outwards. 

Today, as he opens the door to find Ouma setting up another meaningless party game, those dark-water eyes turn up to him, and for all that they’d been so unreadable for so many weeks, today they almost seem… _fond_.

Today, the beast sees a crack in the bars and an opportunity to strike.

Because, see, it’s been almost five weeks now since the technicians had peeled the headset from Momota’s sweaty forehead, and four since he’d noticed a pair of curious, dark-water eyes at the corner of the window on his door before they’d vanished further into the hallway and he’d decided to chase after them. For four weeks he and Ouma have been pretending that this liminal space within the AV room is a sanctuary away from prying eyes and prying thoughts. For four weeks, they’ve kept their mouths shut and swept any unpleasant conversations under the rug, pretending that they’re something close to normal. Maybe, even, pretending that they’re friends.

_Oh, but that had been a lie, hadn’t it?_ the beast growls as Ouma’s expression falters and turns to concern.

_Of course it had,_ it says before striking.

_Ouma forced you into the role of a pawn in his twisted little mind games completely against your will_ , the beast snarls as Momota overturns the coffee table and sets his sights on the couches next. 

_Ouma taunted you and misled you and manipulated you all without a care for anyone besides himself. Underneath that frail exterior is still the rotten, self-serving sadist that murdered Iruma by proxy and threw Gonta to the wolves,_ it sneers as he spills cotton entrails all over the torn up sofas.

_He made a murderer out of you and he won’t even let you speak of it!_ it roars as he tears apart playing cards and casts tiles across the floor.

Couches and televisions and puzzles and more—he lets the beast tear into everything but won’t let it sink its claws into the one thing it wants.

_The game might be no more but its influence is never going to die,_ it argues. _You might have thought yourself special as you gripped it by the thorns and ripped it out of the ground, but the roots still remain._

_All that pain and suffering and look what you’ve both got to show for it in the end._

_Absolutely_ **_nothing_ ** _._

With no more furniture left to destroy, Momota lets out one final, broken roar. With it, the beast slips back into its cage and he falls to his knees.

The room goes quiet. The only sound he can hear is his own breathing as it gasps out of him in rough, choked bursts. He clenches his hands into fists on his thighs and wrenches his eyes shut tight enough that the hot, angry tears won’t spill. 

No matter how hard he’d tried, the beast had still won, hadn’t it? In the end, he wasn’t any better than what he’d always been.

He hears tentative footsteps make their way through the rubble, then a shift of fabric as Ouma squats down in front of him. Momota waits for him to run, but he doesn’t. He waits for a biting insult, but one never comes. He waits and waits, huddling further into his self-loathing and fear as he waits for the blows to strike.

But, well, as much as they’ve tried to avoid putting words to it, they’re the same in a way. If Momota were being honest, he’s known it since that fateful night in the hangar. He’s not the only one struggling under the weight of his own shame and doubt. The beasts lurking within them might be made of different stuff, but they eat them up from the inside out all the same.

Ouma doesn’t say a word, but he does lay one hand on Momota’s shoulder. 

It’s enough.

Before he can even think, Momota’s already reeling him in.

“I don’t forgive you,” he growls into the sharp, boney line of Ouma’s collarbone, even as he carefully folds himself around the other boy like a moon-shy crocus. “I’ll _never_ forgive you for what you did.”

Ouma laughs broken, bitter skepticism into his chest but allows himself to be engulfed all the same. 

And if Momota doesn’t have much control over himself at the moment, well, it doesn’t really matter. His hands both roam the expanse of Ouma’s back with nervous, unrestrained fervor,tracing the knobs of his spine like braille as though they might spell something out for him—as though they’ll give him an answer where five stupid weeks’ worth of breaking himself apart from the inside out still hasn’t. Ouma’s waist is narrow, so narrow that his hands span the entire width of it as he anxiously spreads them them out, until his fingers meet in the middle and his palms lie flat. From there he thumbs the curve of Ouma’s sides and smooths his hands up and down. Over and over. Whether he does it as a comfort to Ouma or to himself is anyone’s guess at this point. Again, it doesn’t really matter in the end, does it?

Ouma smells like generic body wash and ozone—an odd combination, but a grounding one. This, at least, is real—as real as Momota’s cowardice, his heartache, his bloodlust, and his desperate, all consuming need to be needed. And those have to be real, because it would be far too difficult to make them out of nothing, right? Those have to have a true source somewhere in the rubble of his broken-down selves.

If that’s the only solace he can cling to, he’ll continue to dig his fingers into it as tightly as he does the taut skin of Ouma’s shoulder blades.

(He hates that his fingers still can’t decide if they want to hold the boy or break him.)

“The _fuck_ is this?” he chokes out, a desperate, frustrated sob muffled into Ouma’s shoulder. “Who the _fuck_ are we?”

He feels Ouma’s head tip over to gently rest against his own. “Who knows,” the boy replies, barely a whisper, as he tucks his chin across Momota’s hunched shoulder. 

This new Ouma doesn’t really lie all that much. 

Momota isn’t sure if he’s grateful for that or not.

It’s a Friday, and spring is on the horizon.

_A time of new beginnings_ , Team Dangan Ronpa had said.

Momota hides his tears in the curve of Ouma’s neck.

One week left.  


 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The AV room has been closed for renovations. Not that it matters much, because the ward will be empty in less than twenty-four hours. 

“Hey,” Ouma asks as he swings his legs back and forth where they’re slotted between the bars of the rooftop railing. “How old are you, anyway?”

Momota, lying on his back only a few feet away, thinks on it for a second. “I turn eighteen next month. Why, how old are _you_?”

“Nineteen in June.”

“Holy shit,” Momota says, leaning up on one elbow to get a better look at him. He gawks. “You’re older than me?”

Ouma leans back from the bars to shoot him a lazy grin. “You should be wishing your _senpai_ a happy graduation, Momota-chan. It is March, after all.”

Momota scowls, but something about the old monicker softens the impact of it. “I refuse to believe someone as scrawny as you is anything older than ten.”

“Believe what you want, jailbait, but it won’t change the facts,” Ouma croons, a teasing lilt bringing some much-missed levity to the conversation. Even Momota can’t help but snort.

He turns back to the stars. 

“Y’know,” he says after a few comfortable minutes of silence. “It’s funny, but I never even gave two shits about the stars before. Now I could name half the night sky if you asked me to.”

That seems to pique Ouma’s interest, as he tracks the line of Momota’s gaze and lies back to follow it. 

They’ve been skirting around this conversation for way too long. The beast is only a low thrum in the pit of his stomach tonight. Something about the cold, late-winter air is calming, in a way. Spring lingers, just around the corner.

Momota takes a deep breath to steel himself. 

“I grew up in the sticks of Kochi,” he starts. “Nothing there but fish and alcoholics. I used to go to the beach with cigarettes I pilfered off my old man and look out at where the sky met the ocean and feel so damn _trapped_.” He chews the inside of his lip, choosing his words carefully. “It’s like, there’s so much space out there, but it’s all just a whole lot of nothing. It makes you _feel_ like nothing _._ ” 

Out here in the wilds of Karuizawa, hidden away from the public, light pollution is low. Castor and Pollux stare straight down at them. The eye-catching orange of Betelgeuse isn’t far off. 

“Our town only got three channels and the internet connection was shit,” he says. “The only reason I even knew about Dangan Ronpa was ‘cause some third year got himself arrested trying to recreate that famous triple-murder from…,” the sentence trails off. “Ah, shit, what season was that again…”

“Thirty-two,” Ouma supplies, voice low and barely above a whisper. “It was the retired Idols season and you’re thinking of Nishikawa Sayuri.”

The name rings a bell. “I figured it was either become another deadbeat statistic like everyone else in town or… go out with a bang. I had so much anger built up in me and Dangan Ronpa seemed like the best way to let it all out. One final hurrah,” he admits. Somehow he feels lighter with the words off his chest. “I took the night bus out to the main island the second I overheard the new season was holding auditions.” 

Ouma hums thoughtfully, oddly quiet.

“So what about you,” Momota asks, turning his head back down to face him. “Knowing all the seasons and character names. What, were you another super-fan like Shuuichi?”

Ouma bites out the sort of laugh Momota hasn’t heard him utter since the game. There’s a bitter edge to the cut of his smile. “Hardly,” he answers, which is more than Momota had expected. “At least Saihara-chan had enough substance to even be _that_. I wasn’t anything. I only memorized the facts like the good little schoolboy I was so I could play the part enough to matter.”

Momota tilts his head, frowning. “What's that supposed to mean?”

Ouma shrugs cooly, dropping his hands out at either side of himself. “Pull a pathetic enough face and sing the series’ praises just right and you’re practically guaranteed a spot. So I read contestant profiles under my desk during lectures and filled notebooks with best-of recaps I printed off the fan-sites. It was easy enough to pull off, and the audition site was right down the road from cram school, so I thought ‘sure, why not?’”

The night breeze rustles through the trees surrounding the compound. Ouma’s dark, wispy hair flutters along with it. 

“Playing hooky and sneaking out to the audition was the most freedom I’d had in _years,_ ” he finally says. “The show itself didn't even really matter, beyond that. I think I even was thankful for it, for letting me pretend I had some semblance of control.” 

He laughs again, dragging one tired hand down his face. “At least in the game I had a _purpose._ But I made such a spectacle out of trying to break it, and all it’s going to do is land me a top spot in the fan-favorite polls. Man, what a hypocrite I turned out to be.”

Ouma turns his head to the side. Momota notices the scarce space between them with sudden clarity. 

“You were trapped by too much freedom and I was trapped by too little,” the boy murmurs. His expression falls into something a little wistful, a little sad. “What a pair we make.”

There’s something almost beautiful in the world-weary tilt of Ouma’s smile. They’re both just teenagers—all sixteen of them are—but they already have such a heavy burden bearing down on their shoulders. Momota thinks of what it must have felt like, trying to claw for purchase in a life that wasn’t your own and while being held down by a society that expected too much. He wonders if Team Dangan Ronpa had known what they were doing when they plucked that latent, stubborn determination out from all the little puzzle pieces that made up Ouma Kokichi. He wonders if they had known what a storm that misstep would bring to their doorstep.

He thinks about Ouma, who hid behind lies and made an enemy of the world for its own good. Ouma, who risked it all and put his life on the line for one last Hail Mary that might not have meant anything in the grand scheme of things. Ouma, who was kind enough to give him a few extra hours at life during the game and a few weeks of normalcy outside it.

Ouma, who—as much as he tries to hide it behind a veneer of indifference—seems just as scared and lost as he is behind those night-ripple eyes of his.

“Yeah,” Momota agrees. “I think we made a pretty good one, though.”

Then he reaches out and takes one of Ouma’s outstretched hands. Ouma jolts, just barely, and then stares down at their linked hands with a wide-eyed, curious kind of reverence. 

Momota rubs his thumb over the ridge of Ouma’s boney knuckles. “I’m sorry I killed you,” he finally finds the chance and courage to say.

Ouma’s expression is a somber one. His grip tightens around Momota’s fingers. “I made you do it.”

“Still,” Momota insists. Then, “What are you gonna do when we get out?”

Ouma doesn’t say anything for a long moment, then he tips his gaze back up to the sky. “Well, I already tried my hand at breaking this game and failed," he says with a light but self-deprecating lilt. "Who knows what else there is for me to do.”

He seems to start as Momota begins to pull his hand away, but he only does it so he can roll up onto his forearms and hem Ouma’s head between them. 

“Who says we couldn’t try it again?” he asks, eyes bright. There’s a weird, funny warmth building up in his chest, forcing the beast back, if only for the moment. “I’m sure as hell not ready to let Dangan Ronpa own me just yet,” he insists. “Not now or ever again.”

Ouma regards him curiously, but the hint of a smile tugs at his lips. “We?” he asks, one eyebrow raised.

Momota grins, and it’s the first time it’s felt genuine since he woke up over a month ago. “I meant it when I said we made a good team. One more shot. No secrets or subterfuge this time—just you and me. What do you say?”

(The stars are little pinpricks of light on the surface of Ouma’s dark-water eyes.  Momota thinks of where the ocean meets the sky, and the terrifying emptiness of it.)

Ouma’s smile is a sly, open challenge when he shrugs and says, “I guess one more try wouldn’t hurt,” before sliding a hand up the curve of Momota's neck and pulling him down to meet him.

 

(It feels less lonely this time, somehow.)

 

 


End file.
